I have this conversation at least 3 times a week. Regardless of industry, company size or goals, I find myself continually having to explain why you should be advertising on Facebook.

So I figured I should write a quick little post that would help others understand the 5 reasons I you should be advertising on Facebook.

1. Your Audience is there!

It pains some companies to understand that Facebook is in fact the number 1 social network, with the largest single audience globally. This is to say, Facebook this year hit the 1 Billion users online on the same day. 1 Billion! If you can’t find your target audience in and amongst this audience then I would love to hear about you and what product you sell.

The last statistics provided by Facebook for June 2015 show they had 1.49 Billion monthly active users, and 83% of those are outside of the US & Canada.

Somebody has built the audience for you, simply use it for your businesses’ benefit!

2. Facebook ads are cheaper!

When looking at different advertising mediums, you need to think about cost. Traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines and television are extortionate in comparison to what Facebook can and does offer.

When advertising in a magazine or a newspaper we often pay a small fortune to make sure we have a full page advert, or to make sure it is on a right hand side page to make it more visible. The honest truth is though, in today’s marketing world, with multi screens being the norm, people’s attention spans are just not there anymore. It takes someone on average 12-15 times of seeing the same advert to actually start taking notice of it.

Facebook ads can cost as little as 10p per click, to take someone from your advert to your website. If you do this properly, with a landing page, and you track the traffic arriving, leads generated and ultimately business sold from those clicks, you will soon be able to see your exact Cost per Acquisition and Return on Investment on your advertising. Something which is near impossible to do with more traditional media.

3. You can Target like a sniper!

Facebook ads have one thing that no traditional media can come close to. You can target your audience so specifically that it’s almost unbelievable.

If you want to sell products, only to women, that are dog owners, that live exclusively in London and that are over the age of 35, you can do that.

If your product is for both men and women, you can make individual adverts, one that appeals more to men and another the appeals more to women. This allows you to make sure your advert is a tailor made as possible.

Sometime finding the exact target audience for your business can take time and be tricky, but once you get it right, you’ll soon see that there are limitless possibilities to what you can achieve through Facebook ads.

4. Remarketing - Getting people over the edge!

This is a great tool, which simply put, is IMPOSSIBLE with traditional media. Have you ever been on Amazon looking at a particular product, or Booking.com looking at a particular hotel, simply to find the same product or hotel suddenly being plastered all over your social media. This is REMARKETING! And it’s incredibly powerful.

Reminding people about a particular product, service or brand after they have shown an interest, is one of the most sure fire ways of ensuring you re-capture those potentially lost leads. Quite often people don’t complete a transaction or get in contact with a company, not because they don’t want to, but because they get distracted, or they remember they need to do something else. Quite often retargeting these people is a great way to get them over the edge and bring them back to what they wanted in the first place.

5. Clone - Like Dolly the Sheep.

Once you have an audience and a great mailing list, you can use this to create clone list for targeting. Facebook has created an algorithm to allow you to target similar people to your current mailing list.

This is ingenious as sometimes we don’t know everything that brings people together, such as their interests. Facebook will help you to discover more similar and like minded people, with a simple click of a button.

Imagine if you took your complete client database and simply targeted as many clones of that group of people. What could you achieve?

In summary, if you’re not on Facebook as a business, you’re missing out. Get involved today and make sure your brand stands out as much as possible. Get ahead of your competition and most importantly, engage with potential customers starting now.